Sunday, June 4, 2017

Reflections on transforming leadership in a fast-flowing changing culture

One cannot help but note the targets of the Islamic
terrorist attacks, that seem to cluster around contemporary scenes and events:
popular music concerts, bars, vacation venues, tourist soft targets like Nice
on Bastille Day, crowd-magnets of innocent and unsuspecting innocents. One
cannot help but note also that these monstrous tragedies feed more similar
attacks, in which the most elementary and crude “tools” or instruments are used
to kill: vans, transports, knives, home-made bombs strapped to suicide bombers
and even fake combat vests to frighten all.

Recruitment, self-fulfilling and
sustaining violence as the agent of fear, disorientation and the distraction of
building a massive ‘homeland security’ apparatus that takes money and human
resources away from the ‘normal’ provision of human services….these are totally
irreconcilable forces. Normal anticipated and expected government initiatives
(the provision of schools, hospitals, scientific research, foreign aid and even
the national security apparatus) all have resources (both fiscal and human)
pulled away from their normal pathways in order to be directed to protecting us
from these monsters….really petty criminals whose toxic life purpose has been
so squashed into wreaking havoc for the sake of more havoc.

One of their most favoured tools is the social media,
whose censorship is complicated and impeded by the national laws rules and
regulations that do not permit or encourage internationally-imposed
restrictions. With most digital companies operating from the United States, for
example, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is highly restricted in any
impulse to ask that corporation to shut down all accounts accessed by the Islamic
terrorists. Freedom of speech, a noble and laudable national value then is
turned on itself by these terrorists, as an instrument both of recruitment and
strategic planning and execution. And, thus far, the immediacy and urgency of
the crisis does not give governments, including the legal systems, either time
or open pathways to surgically block the flow of digital information that
enables the flow of dangerous information (how to make a bomb) and the flow of
money to finance these operations. Information sharing, another laudable and
worthy value, especially between national security officials and departments,
while potentially enhanced by digital technology, does not have a similar
infrastructure that we have built to research and attack biological microbes
like the ebola virus.

And this new transnational terrorist threat can be
compared with a microbial virus, lethal, constantly morphing, spreading in ways
we have yet to block, and for which we do not have an antidote sufficiently
sophisticated that it can effectively combat this toxic virus. The military and
the law enforcement components of our established institutions, while
over-worked and potentially underfunded in many quarters, are by definition
(not by competence) inadequate to defeat this enemy.

Even the galloping advances in technology are part of
the “problem” in that the terrorist cells are on the cutting edge of
technology, and the institutions that are designed to protect citizens in many
countries are scrambling to catch up and to stay ahead of the moving and
morphing technology. So there is both a micro and a macro aspect to just the
technology divide: micro in the specific devices, and macro in the cross-border
legal ‘protections’ and barriers to international co-operation.

To say that the world, no matter where you live, is
growing increasingly uneasy, is an understatement. To say that the world will
not surrender or yield to the terrorist threat is also an understatement.
Witness, the upcoming concert in Manchester later today, both as an act of
defiance and as a fund-raising opportunity, that will be broadcast around the
globe. To say that Muslims of good faith have an integral role to play in the
universal effort to combat Islamic terrorism is another understated truth. To
say that the non-Muslim community does not fully comprehend the divide that
currently exists within the Islamic world is obvious, and our individual and
collective “ignorance” (I do not know) needs to be addressed is also obvious.

Touting platitudes, however, is little more than
putting band aids on a deadly tumor: superficial, ineffective and probably more
inhibiting than enabling of counter-terrorist research and initiatives by the
people who really grasp the nuances of the “disease”. We simply do not
comprehend actions like those of trump in selling $365 billion in military
materiel to the Saudi’s over the next ten years, the demonstrated long-term
funding source of the Salafi version of Islam around the world, and the violent
enemy of the Shia Iran, thereby putting America in the middle of this
intra-Muslim conflict.

We also do not understand the apparent balkanized
efforts between and among nations to combat what muted voices are calling the
“scourge of our time”. There is no country, and thereby no city that can confidently
claim to be immune to this Islamic terrorist threat. Therefore, there is no
perceptible reason to impede collaboration and co-operation even between
countries normally at odds or even enemies, from working together deploying
their best brains and their best intelligence and their research labs in a
concerted, sustained and collaborative initiative on behalf of the world’s
people.

Proposing ideas, that most likely have long been
considered by the appropriate and deployed “brains” seems somewhat redundant
also. The question of whether the world is confounded not by the most creative
initiatives to fight Islamic terror but by the problem of securing geopolitical
co-operation that is real and trust-worthy leaps to the fore. In many human
issues, we face an ideological divide that pits immediate perceived domestic
economic needs against longer term global exigencies. This is certainly the
case over global warming and climate change, and potentially also over Islamic
terrorism.

The Churchillian adage that America will do the right
thing after it has attempted all other possibilities is no longer either
acceptable or sustainable. Drawing up the draw-bridge over the moat that
divides America from the rest of the world (as trump has done on climate) is not
only dysfunctional on the issue, it is also modelling an attitude of the
ostrich with its head in the sand on other issues. Not that the world defers to
America as the sole or prime solution to all world problems. Yet, America’s
seat at the table on all global issues can not and must not be left vacant when
the world’s interdependence is so glaringly evident.

Devolution to the lowest common denominator, the most
isolated and frightened electoral base, on terror and on global warming is not
merely short-sighted but also highly dangerous to those very same people.

Collaboration, co-operation and international
integration, of course, is far more complicated, and costly and more nebulous
of easy identification of the leaders and the followers (not a playing field
favourable to dictators) than personal edict. It is also at its root, the only
pathway to a political, economic and balanced resolution with the most intransigent
people and intractable issues. On intelligence sharing, ingenuity,
deconstruction of national and sectoral barriers of pride and independence, and
on the search for ways to do different things very differently than our history
has previously done, these are at least a minimum that ordinary people of all
nations should be able to expect from our political leadership.

We are growing tired of phrases like “We have been
quite successful in deterring terrorist attacks” and demand more phrases and
actions that demonstrate an international, collaborative and visionary plan
that personal political careers are less important to decision-makers than the
welfare of the people they serve, not only in their own country but around the
globe.

These transnational existential threats will not
succumb to merely national placebos or anodynes. Their complexity, severity and
persistence require, even demand, the highest and most honest and trust-worthy
leadership from all global leaders. And the media that serves as the microphone
for world leaders will have to lift their eyes from the hourly ratings numbers,
and the instant corporate dividend digital crawl and take stock of their
responsibilities offering their audiences a far-more relevant and discerning
perspective than the hourly or minute-by-minute dissection of how many people
are running down which street and how many ambulances and fire trucks are on
the current disaster scene.

We have to demand a different “framing” of our
situation, one that serves the long-term interests of all humans, not merely
the immediate narcissistic needs of the ‘big boys’ in politics, corporations
and media. After all, without us, they are nothing!